We often talk about the “Open Web” or “the web as a platform” and it certainly resonates from some, but for others, not so much. It’s a murky concept for sure. Prior to my time at Mozilla, I must admit that I didn’t spend a lot of cycles thinking about the web as a platform, what’s important about it, the key attributes, much less its health. Like most of us, I just used it and assumed it would always be there. My sense is that people think about the open web about as much as they did the “environment” before the environmental movement first gained broad traction in the early ’70s.

Given that much of Mozilla’s mission is about nurturing and creating a healthy web environment, it seems we should have some way to understand and track its health. Just like a doctor wants to understand your symptoms before treatment, or a business tracks its inventory, maybe we need the same thing for the open web. Perhaps there’s a need for some kind of report that tracks key metrics that would give us qualitative and quantitative insight into the health of this so called open web.

There are plenty of reports that monitor traffic like Keynote or Akami’s State of the Internet report that highlights attack traffic, connection speeds, Internet penetration, etc. These are all good but there’s more to the health of the open web than traffic, speed, and adoption.

A clear understanding of the current state and trends should inform our strategy and let us know where, when, and if we have been successful. It would also tell us when we weren’t. Knowing the problem is certainly the first step to solutions. Ten years ago when one browser had roughly 90% market share it was easy to see the problem. Today – not so much.

So how would you do it? First there would have to be some common understanding of the attributes of the open web we want to monitor. This itself is no easy task, but the 80/20 rule seems applicable here. Tantek did some great work a few years ago when he articulated three principle abilities that were essential to the “open web” namely:

publish content and applications on the web in open standards

code and implement the web standards that that content/apps depend on

access and use content / code / web-apps / implementations

In “Long Live the Web: A Call for Continued Open Standards and Neutrality” Tim Berners-Lee articulated universality as the key principle of the web. He also noted that “some of its most successful inhabitants have begun to chip away at its principles.” The FCC’s Open Internet Order articulated four key concepts that encapsulate the idea of net neutrality – one core principle. Google’s Sergey Brin described some of the same principles and threats in a 2012 Guardian interview. In some of our public policy work we attempted to identify “open web DNA” so we could better address policy threats. These all assume the existence of some common set of principles that underpin the open web.

The world is even more complicated today and I would posit that there are a wide range of additional metrics that collectively indicate the health of the open web and the vitality of the principles we care about. Many of these are not the traditional technical components, but commercial and external market factors that could serve as indicators for the abilities described above. For example, it may include factors like:

Diversity of service providers and ecosystems

Concentration of service providers, publishers, and applications

Adoption of open standards, APIs and languages

Security

User choice and control

Public awareness and activism

Content restrictions

Transparency

Interoperability

HTML5 developers

Relevant economic/growth indicators

Usage patterns and trends

Maybe even a disruption index

If this kind of report already exists, let’s use it more. If it doesn’t should we try to create it?

This week friends and family celebrated the life of Veronica McCarthy. While she may have died of cancer, she lived of joy and grace. I went to the funeral this week which was at first surreal and upsetting, but it turned out different. I was struck by an overwhelming sense of gratitude. I looked down the pew and saw all these men and woman who she had touched in profound and material ways. Some of these men I’ve known for over two decades and they are different because of her. Different (as in better) in ways you can’t begin to measure or put a price on. All I could think was what a blessing she was and how lucky we were to know her. She did for some of us what we couldn’t do for ourselves. She instilled a faith and sense of possibility that I couldn’t see at the time, but she could. She also did it in a way that made you feel special, like she was only talking to you. I guess that’s one of those grandma tricks, where all the kids feel most special. When I think of Veronica, or St Veronica as some of us called her, I can only say – Thank you.

We’re encouraged by the European Commission’s efforts to ensure that users have meaningful browser choice in the Windows PC environment. The 2009 Commitments adopted by Microsoft were a foundational part of the remedy developed by the Commission to resolve Microsoft’s competition violations in EC countries. A key part of the remedy was Microsoft’s commitment to present the browser ballot screen to Windows users through vehicles like the Windows 7 Service Pack 1. Earlier this year, we learned that Microsoft failed to fully comply with the browser choice ballot screen obligation for nearly 15 months.

Most recently the EC sent a statement of objections to Microsoft for failing to include the browser-choice screen as promised. Our data suggests that the absence of the browser choice screen had the following impact:

Daily Firefox downloads decreased by 63% to a low of 20,000 just prior to the fix;

After the fix, Firefox downloads increased 150% to approximately 50,000 per day; and

Cumulatively 6 to 9 million Firefox browser downloads were lost during this period.

After accounting for the aggregate impact on all the browser vendors, it seems like this technical glitch decreased downloads and diminished the effectiveness of the remedy ordered in the 2009 Commitments.

Over the past few years we’ve become more engaged in public policy issues driven by proposed legislative and regulatory actions that threaten core tenants of the open web. These threats are global in nature and manifest themselves in national legislative bodies, judicial venues, trade organizations, and international treaty setting bodies among others. After engaging in a number of policy issues such as SOPA, ACTA, DNT, jailbreaking, and further seeing a forecast of “more rain” we set out to craft a draft framework that could guide our approach on these issues.

The framework is not meant to be exhaustive nor be a detailed roadmap, but rather directional in nature. Hopefully it’s a level set and creates a common point of reference for our community. As time goes on, we’ll naturally iterate and develop the ideas further. At this point we want to test it, incorporate feedback, and see if the approach makes sense. Please add any comments to the governance thread here.

Some key assumptions that inform the framework are:
• Tech policy can help or hurt the web
• Key attributes of the open web need to be nurtured and protected
• All tech policy issues are not the same
• We can make a difference
• The nature of the threat will dictate different kinds of responses
• We remain a project that is primarily focused on building stuff
• Don’t build what already exists

The framework reflects our current thinking and should answers key questions like:
• What’s the goal? What are we trying to protect?
• Can we make a difference?
• Why do we get involved?
• When do we get involved and when don’t we?
• How do we engage?

If you want more color on some of these ideas, take a look at the presentations below where we have begun discussing the broader notions of threats to the open web.